redesign everything
Ray and Charles Eames said, “One could describe Design as a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose.” By that definition, everything is designed, not just the phone in your hand or this website, yet little is well designed. Poor design of a door handle is annoying. Ill considered user flows for web applications are irritating.
But everything is designed. Policy, government, law, economies, everything. Planned obsolescence (read: designed obsolescence) fills our garbage dumps with waste, our oceans with plastic, and our atmosphere with carbon. We’ve even purposely excluded women, people of color, and LGBTQ from having the same rights as everyone. Racism is designed. Hate is designed.
When one person has trouble opening a door it’s annoying, but when thousands of people walk through that door, what was annoying for one becomes a much bigger problem. Now consider the above list of disenfranchised people and note that poor design at scale is killing us. Literally. The climate crisis, systemic racism, discrimination, and misinformation, are designed constructs and can be eliminated. Society can be redesigned to be inclusive and reasonable for everyone and it will take work, but it’s worth the effort for the sake of our planet and all it’s inhabitants.
We do not have to live with poor design. Everything can be redesigned.
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We can make a difference.
A Users Response to a Design
When we design an interface or an object, we design it to be used. If it’s a physical object it might have an affordance (an indicator) about how to hold the object or where to put your finger. In an interface, we design in similar affordances. If an interface is well designed, you know where to touch or click to move forward.
When something is poorly designed, the opposite is true. You don’t know where to click or what to do. So often, users of a system will develop workarounds. They fumble their way through and figure out how to advance, despite the design impeding them.
I’m watching Lovecraft Country and listening to the accompanying podcast. In the podcast of the latest episode, this quote was read:
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
― Audre Lorde
The line, “they may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game” is entirely aligned with the idea of a user finding a workaround to a shitty design. In this case, people have to struggle to find ways around a system designed to abuse them. They must find ways to navigate racism or homophobia and in some cases, have done so, but at what cost? THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DO THIS! It is plainly obvious that the system was designed and it was designed in such a way as to subjugate people.
